Running a Small Business – Free Tools

Running a studio is more than recording bands. It’s scheduling, project planning, invoicing, and everything else that goes into any other small business. But producer/engineers have to be cool while doing the business side of things. Otherwise you lose your aura of awesome.

When we first started out, I signed up for just about every web account I could get my hands on that might potentially help us run our business smoothly. There wasn’t really much business to manage, but I sure was ready for it. The running joke became, “Hey Dan, I found this website that…” After two years running Wizkid Sound, we’ve got the tools down.

I’ll briefly introduce the tools we use in this post, and go into some more detail later. All of these tools are completely free or free for the basic accounts. Look carefully for the free account links on the Basecamp and Highrise signup pages.

Scheduling – Google Calendar

Dan and I share two Google Calendars, one for scheduling at the studio, and the other for sharing events that we might both be interested in, like concerts. We also share the studio calendar with Ken over at Soundstep Productions so he knows when he can schedule time to record here. From a desktop or a mobile phone we can check and add events to the shared calendars, so we can schedule from anywhere and the other two know what’s going on and when. For the tech savvy bands, we can send them the event to add to their calendars.

Project Planning – Basecamp

Basecamp from 37Signals is an excellent project planning tool. I’ve tried pretty much all of them and like the way Basecamp works the best. Their web interface is fantastic, and it’s almost fully functional on the iPhone too. We use the Milestone feature to set date-specific deadlines (finish mixing by x date) and To-Dos to set unbounded goals (get new mic cables). We try to finish the To-Dos on a weekly basis. We use the Writeboard feature to brainstorm and to lay out our weekly meeting agenda, and occasionally use the Messages feature to share files or links that we don’t want to lose in emails.

Contact Management – Highrise

Highrise is 37Signals’ contact management tool, and it’s ideal for us. It’s really quick and easy to add contacts, and we have people tagged as ‘band’ and sometimes more specifically as ‘bassist’, ‘violinist’, etc. so we can quickly find someone if we need a session player. We also tag bands as ‘prospects’ so we know who to follow up with. The great thing about Highrise is that it’s free for 2 users and up to 250 contacts (you have to look carefully for this plan on the signup page, it’s in small text). We’re close to 250, but when we hit the limit we have to clean contacts out, which is a great way to keep our lists up to date. Another neat feature of Highrise is their ‘Dropbox’. When you’re emailing with someone who’s a contact, you can copy your personal dropbox email address on the message, and it’s automatically added to the contact as a note.

Invoicing – Freshbooks

Yawn. Invoicing is boring. But not with Freshbooks. It takes just seconds to set up a new client, make an invoice, and send them an email with the invoice attached along with account information so they can log in and see their latest bill at any time. The invoices look great printed out, too. The Estimate feature is handy for keeping track of what we quote bands for a project. If they decide to go with it, we convert it to an invoice and bam, no more work to do. Freshbooks has a lot of awesome features that we don’t use all the time (ability to mail invoices from the web, recurring invoices, online payment, extensive reporting, time tracking) but the features we do use are awesome. I have a personal Freshbooks account too, where I keep track of my contractor hours at WeTheCitizens.

Taxes – Outright

Part of running a small business is dealing with taxes. Outright is as straightforward as you can get. There’s four tabs: Income, Expenses, Taxes, Reports. Simple enough? Outright lets you know how much tax you owe paying annually or quarterly, and lets you break items down by category (advertising, business expenses, travel, etc.). It also gives you a snapshot of your total income so far this year. Though we haven’t set these up yet, Outright can integrate with other services – Freshbooks to calculate your taxes automatically, and Shoeboxed to keep track of your expenses.

Sharing Income and Expenses – Billmonk

We split all of our income and expenses right down the middle, which makes things fairly simple to keep track of. Billmonk is a very simple service that helps with that task. Any time one of us pays for something, we log it in Billmonk, where there’s a running total of how much we owe each other. You can enter items on the web, by mobile phone, or by email. You don’t have to split things 50/50 – you can decide how much each person owes, and even have more than two people in a transaction. There’s also a log of all recent events, and the ability to export all transactions as a spreadsheet document.

In Conclusion…

You could probably do all of this with a set of spreadsheets, but that would be quite a headache to set up, and not nearly as appealing as these awesome websites. There are other solutions out there that will handle all these tasks and more, but at a price. We’ve found that this set of tools lets us keep up to date with the business side of the studio with minimal effort and cost.